Opinion---Ghost Hunting, Ancestor Worship and the Search for a Usable Past in The Lost Cause

The Ghost of Bobby Lee, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic Magazine, April 13, 2010.

CWL: This essay may help answer the question "Will be able to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War without being either politically correct or politically incorrect?"

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Ken Burns' Civil War documentary makes note of the fact that General Lee was opposed to slavery. I basically took that as true, until--in all honesty--some of my commenters informed me that it, in fact, was not. One of the saddest, and yet telling, aspects of the War, for me personally, is that on the two occasions when Confederate troops headed North, they kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery. Ditto for black soldiers who were captured and "lucky" enough not to be killed. Anyway, if you have a moment check out this lecture a reader was kind enough to send to me. At about the 55:00 mark, Elizabeth Brown Pryor talks about Lee's relationship to slavery, and more interestingly, how the myth that he was somehow anti-slavery came to be.

It was sad to hear frankly. If the war actually weren't about slavery, I think all our lives would be a lot easier. But as I thought on it, my sadness was stupid. What undergirds all of this alleged honoring of the Confederacy, is a kind of ancestor-worship that isn't. The Lost Cause is necromancy--it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn't about "honoring" the past--it's about an inability to cope with the present.

The God of History binds the Confederacy in its own chains. From the declaration of secession in Texas...

...in this free government *all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights* [emphasis in the original]; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states....

To Virginia...

The people of Virginia in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under said Constitition were derived from the people of the United States and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression, and the Federal Government having perverted said powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States.

To Mississippi...

....Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin...

To South Carolina...

...A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

To the Vice-President of the Confederacy itself...

The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew." Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...

This is about a lancing shame, about that gaping wound in the soul that comes when confronted with the appalling deeds of our forebears. Lost Causers worship their ancestors, in the manner of the abandoned child who brags that his dead-beat father is actually an astronaut, away on a mission of cosmic importance.

I know how this goes. For us, it's coping with the fact that people who looked like you sold you into slavery. It's understanding that you come from a place that was on the wrong side of the Gatling gun. It's feeling not simply like one of history's losers, but that you had no right to win. The work of the mature intellect is to reconcile oneself to the past without a retreat into fantasy--in either direction. Claiming to be the descendant of kings and queens is just as bad as claiming to be thankful for the slave trade.

It's weak to manipulate the dead in order to reconcile our present, to force men to play our Gods. Robert E. Lee was a man, and a product of a time and place that turned people into, quite literally, the most valuable resource in this country. I hate to keep taking it back to David Blight but...

By 1860 there were approximately 4,000,000 slaves in the United States, the second largest slave society--slave population--in the world. The only one larger was Russian serfdom. Brazil was close. But in 1860 American slaves, as a financial asset, were worth approximately three and a half billion dollars--that's just as property. Three and a half billion dollars was the net worth, roughly, of slaves in 1860. In today's dollars that would be approximately seventy-five billion dollars. In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America's manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together. Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy. The only thing worth more than the slaves in the American economy of the 1850s was the land itself, and no one can really put a dollar value on all of the land of North America.

These were the kind of forces at work in his world, and I'm not convinced we have the intrinsic right to expect someone like Lee to oppose them. Likewise, I may think that it was sinister for people who "looked like me" to sell me into slavery, but that presumes an expectation of racial unity which almost certainly didn't exist at the time. Again, it summons the dead to do the work that I would shy away from.

I think this boils down to the problem of nationalism, and where we find our heroes. It isn't like Southerners are devoid of people who were courageous in all aspects. There's the great Virginian patriot George Henry Robert Thomas, who goes from slave-master in waiting, to leading black troops in brilliant military campaigns in Tennessee, and in his last days defends the rights of freedman. There's Elizabeth Van Lew, who emancipated all her slaves before the War, and used them as part of a Union spy network in Richmond, the Confederate capitol.

There's "The Boat-Thief" Robert Smalls, a slave who stole Confederate transport steamer, filled with armaments, and sailed it to Union lines. There's Andre Callioux, a manumitted slave turned Union soldier, martyred at Port Hudson in a kamikaze-like charge on the Confederate works. And a century later, there's Martin Luther King, arguably the modern founding father of this America. He was a product of The South, and his moral judgement didn't end at the Mason-Dixon line.

Finally, there's the question of how we claim ancestors, a question that is more philosophical than biological. Africa, and African-America, means something to me because I claim it as such--but I claim much more. I claim Fitzgerald, whatever he thought of me, because I see myself in Gatsby. I claim Steinbeck because, whether he likes it or not, I am an Okie. I claim Blake because "London" feels like the hood to me.

And I claim them right alongside Lucille Clifton, James Baldwin and Ralph Wiley, who had it so right when he parried Saul Bellow. The dead, and the work they leave---the good and bad--is the work of humanity and thus says something of us all. And in that manner, I must be humble and claim some of Lee, Jackson, and Forrest. What might I have been in another skin, in another country, in another time?

Text and Image Source: Atlantic Magazine

New and Noteworthy---Irish Troops , Black Troops and American Citizenship

Becoming American Under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship During the Civil War Era, Christian G. Samito, Cornell University Press, 312 pages, November 2009, $39.95.

In Becoming American under Fire, Christian G. Samito provides a rich account of how African American and Irish American soldiers influenced the modern vision of national citizenship that developed during the Civil War era. By bearing arms for the Union, African Americans and Irish Americans exhibited their loyalty to the United States and their capacity to act as citizens; they strengthened their American identity in the process. Members of both groups also helped to redefine the legal meaning and political practices of American citizenship.

For African American soldiers, proving manhood in combat was only one aspect to their quest for acceptance as citizens. As Samito reveals, by participating in courts-martial and protesting against unequal treatment, African Americans gained access to legal and political processes from which they had previously been excluded. The experience of African Americans in the military helped shape a postwar political movement that successfully called for rights and protections regardless of race. For Irish Americans, soldiering in the Civil War was part of a larger affirmation of republican government and it forged a bond between their American citizenship and their Irish nationalism. The wartime experiences of Irish Americans helped bring about recognition of their full citizenship through naturalization and also caused the United States to pressure Britain to abandon its centuries-old policy of refusing to recognize the naturalization of British subjects abroad.

As Samito makes clear, the experiences of African Americans and Irish Americans differed substantially—and at times both groups even found themselves violently opposed—but they had in common that they aspired to full citizenship and inclusion in the American polity. Both communities were key participants in the fight to expand the definition of citizenship that became enshrined in constitutional amendments and legislation that changed the nation.

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, author of Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia states "Christian G. Samito's new book offers a signal contribution to a crucial but understudied aspect of the Civil War--its effect on citizenship. By focusing on the aspirations of Irish and African Americans, Samito shows how the contingencies of war gave opportunities for people at all levels to revise this fundamental attribute. His narrative reveals how a new, more robust national citizenship eclipsed older versions built narrowly around state identity and racial attributes. Samito's story rightly emphasizes the dynamic nature of how Americans have defined and understood citizenship and, in the process, adds a crucial historical dimension to contemporary debates over identity, citizenship, and politics."

Christian G. Samito earned a law degree from Harvard Law School and a doctorate in American history from Boston College. He is the editor of Commanding Boston's Irish Ninth: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Patrick R. Guiney, Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry; “Fear Was Not in Him”: The Civil War Letters of Major General Francis C. Barlow, U.S.A.; and Changes in Law and Society During the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Legal History Documentary Reader. He edits a series about the legal history of the Civil War era, teaches at Boston College and Boston University School of Law, and practices law in Boston.

Text Source: Cornell University Press


Middle and Bottom Images: Irish Banner, Black Troops Poster,

CWL---With Chauffeur, Skip Gates Looks for Lincoln

Looking For Lincoln, Written and Presented by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., with a commentary by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kunhardt McGee Productions/Inkwell Films/WNET, 120 minutes, dvd format, color and b/w, 2009, $24.99.

Henry Louis Gates, author of Lincoln on Race and Slavery and In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past,

"Today he is more myth than man," states Gates within the first minute of the film. When Gates visits the land of Lincoln, he is chauffeured by a black Lincoln (Ford Mercury). Within the first fifteen minutes of the film, Gates is taken to his Cambridge Massachusetts neighbor's home where Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals pitches her book.

The first hour of the film borrows heavily from Andrew Ferguson's 2007 Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America. Citing Lincoln law partner, William H. Herndon's collection of oral history he interrogates 1840s-era reenactors in New Salem, Illinois on the Ann Routledge and the prostitute stories. Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness author Joshua Wold Shenk is queried regarding Lincoln's emotional desposition. Of course Tony Kushner, Steven Spielberg's screenwriter for the film based on Goodwin's book, is queried about his own favorite film. It's Young Mr. Lincoln with Henry Fonda because the film is so quiet and shows Lincoln strolling along a river; "whatever river that was" recalls the informed screenwriter.

David Blight, esteemed historian, is cut short while making a point by Gates who states that Lincoln had to remind audiences that he was a racist too. Blight comes back with stating that Blacks needed Lincoln to be a symbol and that the fact the Lincoln in the 1850s took the side of the white working man. In an interview m magazine editor and African-American Lerone Bennett states that everything he once knew about Lincoln was a lie. "You can't defend Abraham Lincoln without defending slavery," claims Bennett; the statement goes unchallenged by Gates.

Those thinking critically about a flawed and compelling man are students in a high school class which Gates visits. The high school instructor tells Gates that Lincoln has to be taken off the pedestal then returned to it. At a dinner party with Gates, Blight, and James Horton, Harold Holzer states that Lerone Bennett's mistakes are that he judges a 19th century man by late 20th century standards. Horton asks "If you had to elect today any previous U.S. president again to the office and you had to make the decision on his record regarding race" would you re-elect anyone other than Lincoln?

Gates returns to Team of Rivals author Goodwin for a quick summary of the selection of the presidential cabinet. Overall, Gate's search for Lincoln is successful. He finds a masterful orator, a shrewd but moral politician. Bill Clinton talks about his hero, Abraham Lincoln; Clinton sees Lincoln who brought the talent and grew into the office. Clinton's goal was to do that it. Certainly, we are waiting for that to happen in 2009.

Gates visits a memorabilia collector living in Hollywood, Lincoln reenactors, white descendants of Confederate Veterans, and Gettysburg's Cyclorama and Gettysburg College's Lincoln scholar Allan Guelzo, black descendants of Confederate camp servants "who simply want to remember their relative's courage". For George W. Bush, Abraham Lincoln is to be admired for his morality clarity.

Overall, the film handles evenly the multiplicity of interpretations concerning the life, work and motivations of Abraham Lincoln. The round table session of Blight, Horton, Holzer and Gates as well as the one-on-one interview of Gates and Blight are the strengths of the film. The remarks in the high school class room with the remarks of the instructor are noteworthy. CWL recommends Looking for Lincoln to history instructors and discussion group leaders. Near the end of the film Gates who is concerned with Lincoln's shortcomings on race is told by Goodwin that Lincoln ". . . was so far ahead of anyone at that time and he needed to win the war." She closes her interview with the statement that Gates' problem is that he was taught a mythology of Lincoln. Gates admits the "it is a great temptation to judge Lincoln" outside of his era. Gates rests his final judgment on the Lincoln's sentiments of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address.

Middle Image: Harvard University Gazette

Bottom Image: Huffington Post

News--- Jeff Davis's White House Infiltrated By Union Intelligence Network

Slave in Jefferson Davis' Home Gave Union Key Secrets, Barbara Starr and Bill Mears, CNN, February 20, 2008

William Jackson was a slave in the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis during the Civil War. It turns out he was also a spy for the Union Army, providing key secrets to the North about the Confederacy. Jackson was Davis' house servant and personal coachman. He learned high-level details about Confederate battle plans and movements because Davis saw him as a "piece of furniture" -- not a human, according to Ken Dagler, author of "Black Dispatches," which explores espionage by America's slaves. "Because of his role as a menial servant, he simply was ignored," Dagler said. "So Jefferson Davis would hold conversations with military and Confederate civilian officials in his presence."

Dagler has written extensively on the issue for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence . In late 1861, Jackson fled across enemy lines and was immediately debriefed by Union soldiers. Dagler said Jackson provided information about supply routes and military strategy.

"In Jackson's case, what he did was ... present some of the current issues that were affecting the Confederacy that you could not read about in the local press that was being passed back and forth across local lines. He actually had some feel for the issues of supply problems," Dagler said. Jackson and other slaves' heroic efforts have been a forgotten legacy of the war -- lost amid the nation's racially charged past and the heaps of information about the war's historic battles. But historians over the last few decades have been taking an interest in the sacrifice of African-Americans during those war years.

Jackson's espionage is mentioned in a letter from a general to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell refers to "Jeff Davis' coachman" as the source of information about Confederate deployments. Dagler said slaves who served as spies were able to collect incredibly detailed information, in large part because of their tradition of oral history. Because Southern laws prevented blacks from learning how to read and write, he said, the slave spies listened intently to minute details and memorized them.

"What the Union officers found very quickly with those who crossed the line ... was that if you talked to them, they remembered a great more in the way of details and specifics than the average person ... because again they relied totally on their memory as opposed to any written records," he said. Jackson wasn't the only spy. There were hundreds of them. In some cases, the slaves made it to the North, only to return to the South to risk being hanged. One Union general wrote that he counted on black spies in Tennessee because "no white man had the pluck to do it."

No one was better than Robert Smalls, a slave who guided vital supply ships in and out of Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. He eventually escaped and provided the Union with "a turning of the forces in Charleston Harbor," according to an annual report of the Navy secretary to President Lincoln. "A debriefing of him gave ... the Union force there the entire fortification scheme for the interior harbor," Dagler said.

One of the most iconic spies was Harriet Tubman, who ran the Underground Railroad, bringing slaves to the North. In 1863, she was asked by the Union to help with espionage in South Carolina. She picked former slaves from the region for an espionage ring and led many of the spy expeditions herself. "The height of her intelligence involvement occurred late in 1863 when she actually led a raid into South Carolina," Dagler said. "In addition to the destruction of millions of dollars of property, she brought out over 800 slaves back into freedom in the North."

As the nation marks Black History Month in February, Dagler said that history should include the sacrifices of the African-Americans who risked their lives for their nation. Many paid the ultimate sacrifice. "They were all over the place, and no one [in the South] considered them to be of any value. Consequently, they heard and saw virtually everything done by their masters, who were the decision-makers," Dagler said.

Whatever happened to William Jackson, the spy in Jefferson Davis's house?Unfortunately, that remains a great unknown. "He simply disappeared from history, as so many of them have."

CNN's Wayne Drash contributed to this report.

Text and Image Source: CNN, February 20, 2009

CNN Video on Black Spies

CWL: It seems likely that William Jackson's intelligence collection began and ended in 1861. More important Elizabeth Van Lew's intelligence network that began in late 1862 and early 1863. Van Lew was communication with several Richmond blacks close to the Davis' home.

News: 29th Connecticut, African-American Regiment, Receives New Memorial

Memorial To Black Civil War Regiment To Be Unveiled,Alaine Griffin, Hartford Courant,September 19, 2008.

As a boy, Harrison Mero heard stories about his Grandpa Joe secretly ferrying slaves to the North through the Underground Railroad and listening to abolitionist Frederick Douglass speak in Connecticut. "We heard how Grandpa Joe was an outspoken guy at a time when people were fearful about speaking up," Mero said. But it wasn't until the day he buried his father in 1964 that Mero, 67, of Hamden, discovered another chapter in his great-grandfather's legacy.

In the same Woodbridge cemetery where Mero's father was buried, Grandpa Joe rested under a military headstone. Mero would later learn that Joseph K. Stills was one of more than 900 black and Native American men from throughout the state who volunteered to fight for the Union during the Civil War in the Connecticut 29th Colored Regiment. On Saturday, Mero and other descendants of the 29th will gather in Criscuolo Park in New Haven to unveil a much-anticipated memorial to the regiment. Mero said the memorial gives the unit long-overdue recognition and helps promote the dissemination of a rarely told Civil War chapter.

"This is history that children don't know," Mero said. In 1863, African American and Native American men from throughout the state enlisted for duty at the former Camp Terry in New Haven. The encampment along Long Island Sound — now a park with baseball fields and a playground — will be home to the memorial bearing regiment members' names.

Although they fought for the same cause as other Union soldiers, the men of the 29th were not treated as equals. They endured racial slurs, lived in poor conditions and could not carry guns until they left the state to fight. They were rarely promoted, and they were paid less than half of a white soldier's salary. The 29th fought in several crucial Civil War battles in Virginia and was the first infantry unit to reach the Confederate capitol of Richmond after Union forces broke through Gen. Robert E. Lee's lines.

The 29th returned to Connecticut in October 1865. Forty-eight of the regiment's soldiers were killed, 139 were wounded and 178 died from disease, according to Tom Acri, an eighth-grade social studies teacher in Milford who wrote his master's thesis on the regiment while at George Mason University. Grandpa Joe survived the war and moved back to Connecticut, where he worked as a mason, stonemaker and carpenter until his death in Woodbridge on Feb. 6, 1909. As a child, Mero said, all he knew about the war came from John Wayne movies and Margaret Mitchell's book, "Gone With the Wind."

"When you saw something about the Civil War back then, our people were depicted as slaves working in the big house, talking in broken English," Mero said. "We assumed the war was all white people. My people were never shown on the battlefield." While in high school, Mero said, he read about the Buffalo Soldiers, the black cavalry and infantrymen sent to the Western frontier after the war. But it was not until Mero was in his 20s that he learned about his great-grandfather's role in the Civil War and the history that took place so close to home.

After his father's burial, Mero turned to his older brother, Albert, who told him about the 29th and about other relatives who served in the Civil War. A house fire at a relative's home destroyed photographs and documents that could verify his brother's stories, though. So with the clock ticking on who in their family could recall tales from the Civil War, the Mero family held a family reunion. Long-lost relatives connected. And those who had been quiet about history in the past began to open up, Mero said.

"That family tree ended up going in all kinds of directions," he said. For nearly a decade, the Descendants of the Connecticut 29th Colored Regiment C.V. Infantry told the unit's story in classrooms, but had always hoped to build a monument somewhere to hold their place in history. In 1998, when group members went to Washington, D.C., for the dedication of an African American Civil War memorial there, they talked to the memorial's sculptor, Ed Hamilton, about a monument for the 29th in New Haven. Hamilton, of Louisville, Ky., took the job. The group raised $200,000 for the memorial through grants and donations.

Saturday's dedication — slated for 2 p.m. — will be followed by receptions and a dedication ceremony for youths on Sept. 26 that will include a parade featuring students wearing armbands with the names of 29th Regiment soldiers. "I saw the plaque yesterday, and it brought tears to my eyes," Mero said this week. Though he wishes his brother, Albert, who died in 2006, was alive to see the memorial, Mero will be surrounded by several family members who also worked for years to make the memorial a reality. "This is going to make a very strong statement," Mero said. "It says, 'We were there and now we're back in the place where we started.'"

For more information about the regiment and Saturday's ceremony, visit www.thect29th.org.

Contact Alaine Griffin at agriffin@courant.com.

Text and Photo Source: Harford Courant, September 19, 2008

New---Intensely Human, Intensely Misunderstood

Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War, Margaret Humphreys, Johns Hopkins University Press, 224 pp. 3 halftones, 7 line drawings, 2008, hardcover, $40.00

Black soldiers in the American Civil War were far more likely to die of disease than were white soldiers. In Intensely Human, historian Margaret Humphreys explores why this uneven mortality occurred and how it was interpreted at the time. In doing so, she uncovers the perspectives of mid-nineteenth-century physicians and others who were eager to implicate the so-called innate inferiority of the black body.

In the archival collections of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Humphreys found evidence that the high death rate among black soldiers resulted from malnourishment, inadequate shelter and clothing, inferior medical attention, and assignments to hazardous environments. While some observant physicians of the day attributed the black soldiers' high mortality rate to these circumstances, few medical professionals—on either side of the conflict—were prepared to challenge the "biological evidence" of white superiority.

Humphreys shows how, despite sympathetic and responsible physicians' efforts to expose the truth, the stereotype of black biological inferiority prevailed during the war and after. Margaret Humphreys is the Josiah Charles Trent Professor in the History of Medicine, a professor of history, and an associate clinical professor of medicine at Duke University. She is the author of Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States, also published by Johns Hopkins.

Text: supplied by the publisher

Other Voices: Damn Rare African-American Archives

Man Amasses Black History Treasure Trove, Kathy Matheson, Associated Press, February 23.

As a child growing up in the 1940s, Charles Blockson was once told by a white teacher that black people had made no contributions to history. Even as a fourth-grader, Blockson, who is black, knew better. So he began collecting proof.

Picture: "Slave Trade", from the Middle Passage , envelope, #16, Sec 11, courtesy of The Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Historical Collection, Temple University

Today, the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University contains more than 30,000 historical items, some dating to the 16th century. It includes Paul Robeson's sheet music, African Bibles, rare letters and manuscripts, slave narratives, correspondence of Haitian revolutionaries and a first-edition book by W.E.B DuBois.

"It's really invaluable," curator Diane Turner said. "The materials are just so wonderful and unique." The collection has grown so much since Temple acquired it 25 years ago that it moved into a larger space on campus this month. Blockson, 74, is a historian, lecturer and author who began amassing his collection as a boy living in the Philadelphia suburb of Norristown. His quest began after he asked a substitute teacher about famous black people in history. She replied that there weren't any.

"I set out to prove her wrong," Blockson said. Among his first purchases were the books "Up from Slavery" by Booker T. Washington, "God's Trombones" by James Weldon Johnson and a biography of George Washington Carver. As he grew older, Blockson's hunts for books at the Salvation Army and Goodwill led to searches at more rarefied shops. He recalled a bookstore where he would hide volumes he couldn't afford in hopes they would still be there when he saved up the money.

At Penn State University, where his starring roles on the football and track teams earned him the nickname "Blockbuster," his friends did not understand his passion. "People used to say, `What are you collecting those old books for?'" Blockson recalled. After graduating in 1956, he turned down an offer to play football with the New York Giants and briefly entered the military. His continual collecting and research helped him become an expert on the Underground Railroad; he wrote several books, lectured around the world and met historical figures including Rosa Parks, Langston Hughes and Malcolm X.

Blockson worked as a teacher beginning in 1970. About 13 years later, he gave his collection to Temple and began serving as its curator. The fact that it's at a mainstream university makes it unique among large black historical collections, said Michele Gates Moresi, curator of collections at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Many prominent collections are at historically black colleges, such as Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center in Washington, D.C., she said.

"With the heart of the black community in North Philly, it was a perfect place for it," he said of his decision to house the collection at Temple. Blockson also recently donated thousands of items to the Penn State library, which plans to open the Charles L. Blockson Room in April. There is some overlap with the Temple collection, which emphasizes black history in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, but the Penn State items more broadly document the African Diaspora, said Nancy Eaton, dean of Penn State libraries.

Scholars are lucky that Blockson began collecting when he did, said F. Keith Bingham, archivist at historically black Cheyney University near Philadelphia. Many items in the collection might not be available now or would be prohibitively expensive, he said. Last fall, the University of South Carolina paid $35,000 for a first-edition book by black poet Phillis Wheatley, a slave who once read her work in the presence of George Washington. Blockson said he paid a sliver of that when he acquired his copy 40 years ago.

Today, his collection includes valuable books, pamphlets, posters, taped interviews, artwork and more than 500,000 photographs. Among the rare acquisitions: a copy of Dale Carnegie's "Lincoln the Unknown." The book's jacket has a patch of tanned skin from a black man, which is embossed with the title.

Before retiring at the end of 2006, Blockson lobbied for more room for the collection because it had outgrown its space in Sullivan Hall. Turner, who took over as curator in September, oversaw the move to a larger space in the building. Visitors are greeted by "The Lantern Holder," a type of statue Blockson said indicated safe homes on the Underground Railroad. "It serves as the sentinel to the collection ... to guide people in," he said. Those who follow it can ask to read a copy of Blockson's own autobiography: "Damn Rare: Memoirs of an African-American Bibliophile."

Picture: Curator Diane Turner, right, talks on the phone as workers move books from the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection to a different location at Temple University in Philadelphia, Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008. The collection contains over 30,000 historical items, some dating to the 16th century. AP Photo/Matt Rourke

On the Net: http://library.temple.edu/collections/blockson

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080223/ap_on_re_us/black_history_collection

Biographical Information: The grandson of an escaped slave, historian Blockson has compiled and edited 47 first-person accounts of blacks who stole their way to freedom via the harrowing stratagems and hidden routes generically called the underground railroad. Few of the accounts will be new to students of the rich lode of ex-slaves' narratives; but Blockson brings to bear years of work as the curator of Temple University's Afro-American Collection and his earlier mapping of routes in a National Geographic article. His focus on the emotion and uncertainty of escape makes this work a handy primer on the pain, daring, and drama of the slaves' flight. For Afro-American and antebellum collections. Thomas J. Davis, SUNY at Buffalo, Reed Business Serives

CWL: Blockson's The Undeground Railroad and African Americans in Pennsylvania: Above Ground and Underground : An Illustrated Guide
are the standards in the field for school, undergraduate, and public libraries.

The Underground Railroad is a fascinating collection of letters, diaries and narratives of slaves, with accompanying historical notes and photographs. African Americans in Pennsylvania: Above Ground and Underground: An Illustrated Guide is an encycopedia/biographical dictionary of African Americans and their communities during the mid-19th century. Adams County's Yellow Hill, which was the refuge of many African-Americans during the Battle of Gettysburg about 8 miles to the south, is discussed.

News---New Jackson Film : "How I Loved My Slaves and They Loved Me"?

Still Standing: The Stonewall Jackson Story, Ken Carpenter, Director and Producer, Franklin Springs Family Media, October 2007.

Following copy is from Turning Point Media Relations, Inc., provided by Christian Newswire, October 7, 2007.

"Still Standing: The Stonewall Jackson Story" is a revealing 48-minute documentary recounting the life and faith of Civil War General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and will be available this October from Franklin Springs Family Media. Produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker Ken Carpenter, the film is based on the book "Stonewall Jackson: The Black Man's Friend" (Cumberland House Publishing, 2006). The inspirational book is authored by Richard G. Williams Jr. Williams, who also happens to be the film's co-producer and historical consultant.

Through state-of-the-art imagery and expert narrative, "Still Standing" traces the life of Stonewall Jackson, from his orphaned childhood in what is now West Virginia; to the pivotal role he played as Confederate general in the Civil War; to his death at the age of 39 after being killed by friendly fire. The film features striking new footage from Jackson's boyhood home near Weston, W.Va. and a special look at Jackson's Sunday school classes for African-Americans as well as key Civil War battle sites including Manassas, Chancellorsville, Harpers Ferry and others.

In addition to being adapted from such a great book, another outstanding aspect of the film's appeal is award winning director and producer Ken Carpenter's treatment of the subject. After a distinguished career in film, television and music, Carpenter founded Franklin Films in 1994. Carpenter's faith-based work has included projects for Michael W. Smith, Steven Curtis Chapman, Jeremy Camp, Compassion International, DC Talk, and Big Idea Productions, among others. Carpenter comments:

"Richard Williams's book about Jackson's caring efforts to advance the standing of enslaved people reveals a fascinating side of this great American hero—a side we never learned about in history class. The film explores the character that defined this man and I believe it will inspire and challenge audiences to reconsider preconceived notions about a uniquely complex period in American history."

Williams is an award-winning author specializing in Civil War history. A regular contributor to the Washington Times Civil War column, Williams contributes articles about the war to various publications around the country. "Still Standing" will be Williams' second documentary project. Past projects include co-producing the award-winning video series, "Institute on the Constitution" with constitutional attorney John Eidsmoe. Williams currently serves on the Board of Trustees for the National Civil War Chaplain's Research Center & Museum Foundation at Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA. His passion for America's Christian history has led him to author three books: "Christian Business Legends", "The Maxims of Robert E. Lee for Young Gentlemen", and most especially "Stonewall Jackson ~ The Black Man's Friend." Please visit his website at SouthRiverBooks.com.

"Still Standing: The Stonewall Jackson Story" will be available at FranklinSprings.com & SouthRiverbooks.com beginning October 1. Williams's book is available at CumberlandHouse.com

View a trailer of "Still Standing: The Stonewall Jackson Story" at www.stonewallfilm.com

For Further Information regarding the documentary, resource FranklinSprings.com or contact Turning Point Media Relations, Inc. at 615-261-1818.

CWL thinks:
1. The book and film are the spawn of two scenes in the film Gods and Generals.
2. The curious should check the index of James I. Robertson's Stonewall, The Man, the Soldier and the Legend.
3. Can the complexity of the slave and master relationship in mid-19th century America be adequately and accurately addressed in a 45 minute film? I doubt it.

CWL --- African-Virginians, African-Confederates and African American Attitudes in 1861

Afro-Virginians Attitudes on Secession and Civil War, 1861, Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., in Virginia At War, 1861William C. Davis and James I. Robertson, Jr., University of Kentucky, 2005, pp. 89-112.

Virginia, a bi-racial commonwealth of 500,000 blacks and 1,000,000 whites in 1861 "had more black inhabitants than anywhere else in North America and the most enslaved blacks in the Western Hemisphere except Brazil." Of the Confederacy's 3,700,000 African Americans, Virginia was home to one-sixth of them. The explore their feelings, attitudes and commitments is a difficult thing to do. Very little first-hand documentation of the blacks' voices exists. The record of black voices is mediated by the whites recording of the words and behaviors. In the Southland, the nearly complete lack of African American editorial voices, diaries, letters, makes discovery of African Americans hearts and minds inherently hard work for the researcher. (pp. 89-90)

"Possibly the best means of ascertaining black Virginians' collective and individual perspectives about the times is to examine their works and deeds concerning slavery, free blacks, and Afro-Confederates; there surreptitious longings for freedom as manifested by running away; their relations with the Union army; and limited attempts to rise up against their racial suppressors." The lack of slave revolts is not a sign of lack of desire for freedom. While the Brown raid on Harper's Ferry, VA in October 1859, exposed the climate of fear among slaveholders, the raid came is signify to blacks the coming of a possible future, a meteor of war to use Herman Melville's term. (pp. 90-92)

After Virginia seceded on April 17 and the voters ratified the decision in mid-May, the black servant who daily raised the national colors over the state capitol, rescued the Stars and Stripes from the trash bin and hid it under his bed for the duration of the war. On the other hand, a slaveholder asked Jefferson Davis "Can we really expect the Negroes to stand with us?" Several slaveholders forced their slave families to emigrate to Missouri or Texas. Jordan, the essay's author, states "Confederate Virginians generally regarded slavery and white supremacy as a fundamentally natural order and divinely ordered way of life." Alexander Stephens viewed the Confederate Revolution as a keeping the world right side up and the Northern aggressor as desiring to turn the natural order of things upside down. For Stephens, slavery was the cornerstone of social, political and economic Confederate temple.(pp.93-94)

Desiring freedom, the slaves understood the constraints of the racist society in which they lived and which employed personal violence against them. Free blacks in Virginia faced a two horned dilemma: stay free and avoid the suspicion that they would become the Nat Turners of their day. The slave Nat Turner led a three day massacre in southeastern Virginia in 1831 which accomplished the deaths of over sixty whites and the swift, white response of executing well over 100 slaves.

Free blacks became Afro-Confederates as a means of preserving what freedoms they had.
They volunteered for work details building forts, served in CSA regiments as musicians and as commissary aides. "Afro-Confederates' scruples were either coerced, feigned or sincere," Jordan states. The two-horned dilemma is apparent is the instance of Mortimer Raymond, a black Richmond police informer who "reported on black offenders" but to his own astonishment was sent to the whipping post for the crime of associating "with a white woman upon terms of closer familiarity than the law permitted." His loyalty to whites did not mean that he could exercise a freedom of association with them. (95-97)

During the autumn of 1861, the enthusiasm of Afro-Confederates began to wane. Harsh camp treatment, broken promises and forced labor diminished the early 1861 desire to please and fit into the new Confederate society. Rumors of white led slave revolts were common throughout 1861; arrests and punishments with little or no evidence of revolt were just as common. Jordan states that 1861 closed Afro-Virginians, whether slaves, freemen, or serving in CSA forces, looked to the future "with pragmatic hope." (104-105)